Karl Berglund, "Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
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On this episode, I'm talking to Carl Bergland about reading audio readers, book consumption in the digital age. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much.

This is a fascinating book. And I mean, it's funny talking to you on a books podcast about audio books. And I guess just, you know, having this conversation tells us something about how book consumption has changed in recent years. But I suppose the kind of the place to start with is the kind of intellectuals.

of inspiration um for the book particularly i i guess kind of why write a book about audio readers you know that even that term actually kind of is is quite interesting isn't it so so yeah maybe let's start with kind of why write a book about an audio reader and kind of what an audio reader even is yeah yeah thanks so uh

I mean, an audio reader basically, at least as I frame it in my book, is someone listening to audiobooks, which can be considered a form of reading in a specific book format. But if this is a form of reading, it's also something, of course, that can and should be debated. And that's something that I do in the book. But at least, I mean...

I think that all over, at least Western countries, but specifically in the Nordic countries, we have seen, I mean, a huge boom in streamed audiobooks over the last 10 years. And I mean, it's literally...

Audiobooks are literally taking over in the publishing industry. So, I mean, the last statistics out from Sweden was that, well, around two thirds of the books consumed in Sweden last year were streamed audiobooks. So, I mean, that's an interesting figure. And I know that it's not the same in the Anglophone world, but it's still sort of growing increasingly.

Everywhere, everywhere. So, I mean, I think it's I think that literary scholars and I mean, people interested in reading and book culture and publishing needs to discuss audiobooks and people consuming audiobooks much more extensively than they have done yet. So, yeah, that's why, basically. Yeah. And it's interesting because.

As you flag, you know, the Swedish case studies as we'll get into, but I think more globally, you know, you might be, I guess, kind of worried as a publisher or indeed, you know, someone who...

um is kind of hopeful and supportive of people reading books that you know readers are maybe disappearing but actually there's this kind of boom in um a whole other mode of consumption that still requires writers authors and as we're going to talk about still i guess kind of valorizes um authors and you know people get very kind of

um, attached and interested in the same way they do with physical copies, um, of books. And, and in some ways, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's, uh,

So there have been lots of discussions in the Nordics concerning this boom. And if it's, I mean, if audiobooks then are to be seen as competitors with print books and e-books mainly, which is, I mean, in some ways true. But, I mean, it's also, you could also phrase it the other way that...

audiobook consumption has much more similarities with listening to podcasts or other form of sound media. So it's actually competing with completely different cultural media segments. So thanks to the Audioboom segment,

sort of the publishing industry in the Nordics has grown on a total basis. But still, of course, I mean, I think that two things can be true at the same time. So, I mean, we should also be, I mean, perhaps slightly worried that people perhaps will not read books with their eyes in the same extent in the future.

or actually finished books. And one of the kind of fascinating things, and again, we'll get into this a bit later, is the way that you can do some incredibly detailed research, actually, with the kind of data you can get about audiobook consumption. Much more, I think, detailed than you could have done with physical copies of books. And actually, maybe I'll throw a question about that, because

One of the things that I found really interesting about the book is that as well as this kind of detailed and deep engagement with a theory of reading and, you know, kind of contemporary publishing studies, it's also, I guess, a kind of a book about methods and kind of

new or innovative methods for studying publishing and it'd be interesting to hear a bit about the kind of the methods you were using and I guess the kind of I'd think of them as maybe digital humanities methods yeah yeah I agree and I'm glad that you I mean that this surface here so I really see this as an intervention also in the digital humanities or cultural analytics or

whatever you want, how you want to call this. But, but so basically what sort of the empirical foundation for the whole, for the whole study is streaming data coming from, so user data coming from Storytel and Storytel then is the by far largest subscription book streaming book or audio book streaming service in, in,

the Nordics. So we did a collaboration deal, which was, I mean, interesting, took a lot of time. It was lawyers involved, et cetera. But

I mean, when all those things were in place, Storytel have been really easy to work with in getting this kind of user data. And of course, I mean, with this data, I can study things and patterns on an aggregated level. But what's really unique, I mean, method-wise and in terms of

I mean, reading studies and how you can sort of measure what people do with cultural objects is then that we also have this on an individual level. So data on an individual level per person

uh, per hour during one entire year. Uh, so it, it, the book only concerns the sort of the commercial top segment. So it's not all books, uh, available in the platform that I study. Uh, but in this sort of, uh, commercial important segments, uh, then I could do really detailed analysis of, uh, individual, uh,

users and what they do with audiobooks, when they read them, if they finished them, which kind of readers that clustered together, etc., etc. So I agree. I mean, I argue in the book that this is a completely new way of study, not only the social reading that you can study in Goodreads or BookTok, etc., but also sort of the private and hidden reading practices of the everyday reader.

So you've mentioned earlier that the data allows you to really kind of interrogate the, I guess, kind of commercial end of audiobooks and audio-related publishing. And one thing that this gives us is a sense of what's popular, which authors, which genres. And I'm intrigued to know actually what you found.

was popular because in some ways there were some surprises but what struck me was the kind of things that are popular in the audiobook world are also the kind of things that are popular I guess in kind of mainstream commercial physical book publishing too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one thing that I did was to sort of depart from bestseller list of fiction for print books and then I

I analyzed how these titles performed or I mean, how popular they became in the audio book format to sort of see, to make a format distinction. So, so basically are, are the same books popular in all formats? So is it just sort of a,

I mean, a new way of digesting the same kind of content. And the answer is both yes and no, I would say. So, I mean, you know, I come from the Nordics and we love crime fiction, obviously. And crime fiction is our sort of by far most popular fiction genre in print formats. But that's, I mean, this genre is even more popular in the audiobook format. It's really sort of taking over the bestseller, the bestseller.

or the best streaming lists as I call them because you cannot really call these book bestsellers because no sort of entities are being sold because this is a subscription so I mean what gets what's the most popular in audiobook format is I mean to put it bluntly it's fiction that is quite sort of easy to digest so it's genre fiction it's

I mean, it's crime fiction, it's romance, it's fantasy, those kinds of books. Whereas, for instance, literary fiction and more prestige fiction, which also occasionally at least happen to become bestsellers.

in print, that does not happen in the audiobook format. So the audio best streamer is basically only genre fiction. That's a really, I mean, as I would say, an important thing

distinction because sort of the prestige that the print book lends its buyer, that does not really transfer to the audio format. So what you consume as a streamed audiobook is only sort of the narrative qualities. It doesn't give you any other kind of cultural prestige. And that, I think,

is at least a part of the explanation for this sort of really focus on genre fiction for audiobook listeners or audiobook readers. I think another one has more to do with sort of the...

the audiobook format itself. That, I mean, you cannot have too much going on. Then you will be hard to follow when you listen to it. You need to have a narrative that sort of pulls you in and moves forward. Otherwise, you will get lost. You cannot have fiction that every single sentence is super important. I mean, if you miss one of those sentences, then you will sort of be lost forever.

That will not work in the audiobook format because how people use this medium most of the times is as a way of finding time to listen to literature and fiction in their daily lives. And that means...

that they listen to audiobooks while they do other things. So while they commute, while they are doing the dishes, while they are walking their dog, while they are sort of training at the gym, etc. And at all those occasions, you cannot be or you are not super focused all the time.

on the narrative. Yeah. I mean, you've reminded me one of the major streamers here in the UK, their advertising is explicit about you can basically engage when you're doing the housework like that is, you know, you should be almost, you should be doing something else whilst you're,

doing this kind of book consumption. You mentioned very briefly, you know, the idea of streaming and you don't get a physical object. And I'm interested in, I guess, what the book says about the business model here, because, you know, these are subscription services, people aren't buying objects. Like, I guess, kind of like how...

Is this bit of the publishing industry new or different? And how does it reflect, I guess, kind of longstanding practices in the way publishing works? Yeah, that's a big question. And I think that, I mean, it's both new and not new. So, I mean, audiobooks are old-ish. I mean, they have been around since...

I mean, depending on how you count, you could say that already in the very late 19th century, there were audiobooks, etc. And then, of course, streaming literature to your phone is something new. But what's...

important in this context is that this subscription-based model so in the nordics uh uh having an audiobook subscription works much similar to i mean subscribe to to spotify for instance in in in the anglophone world so you pay a monthly fee and then you get get access to the whole catalog and lots of hours of listening yeah it used to be unlimited but now it's sort of

There is an upper limit, but still it's a really cheap way of getting access to lots of fiction for consumption for their users. And I think that this...

I mean, the whole idea of, I mean, this is a really, really big shift, both for the consumers and for the producers. So instead of just, I mean, having to choose a book and then sort of being stuck with it in a way, right?

As when you buy physical books. Now, I mean, if you don't like a book, then you can just sort of jump to the next one really, really easy without any sort of extra cost for you.

And this also becomes really important for the publishers because they are not paid per streamed book, but per streamed minute. Which means that if people tend to leave the narrative after 10% of it, then they will only get 10% of the payment. So, I mean...

Basically, old publishing in print and e-book, they only cared about selling entities of books. And when the book was sold, then they didn't really care what you did as a reader with your book. I mean, if you read it or not, they had already received the payment. But here it becomes crucial for the publisher to make sure that the reader sticks with the narrative to the bitter end.

And this is, to me, really, really interesting to see sort of the more long-term effects of what this will do with narrative structures, etc. Because I think that this will, at least in the commercial segments of publishing, that this will produce effects.

Thank you.

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What kind of effect? I mean, partially the book gets into who is finishing and who isn't. And, you know, it thinks about the kind of practices of how books are consumed and then what that means for what actually gets finished and then what gets taken up. But yeah, what do you think is going to happen then to particularly these, I guess, kind of popular commercial fiction books?

books or projects that are most popular in the audio format yeah so so uh hard to to to guess of course uh but one thing so i mean as a part of this project we also presented work um

in-house to Storytel, sort of telling them about our results and findings. And this book is a part of a larger project about bestsellers that also involved computational text analysis. And in that project, I worked together with a computational linguist

and tried to look at, I mean, stylistically, sort of the differences between popular audiobooks and popular print books. And then we could see, I mean, very clearly, sort of statistically significant that the popular audiobooks

I mean, they were shorter, they had shorter sentences, they were more verb-focused, more dialogue-focused, they had a less complex syntactic structure overall.

And I think that, I mean, all of those findings makes complete sense to me. The audiobooks and the sort of publishers publishing books that they expect to perform well in the audiobook format, they will make sure that these narratives are sort of instantly drag the reader out.

They need to sort of keep the interest all the way. They will work even more with cliffhangers, et cetera. So I think that all those sort of page turning effects will sort of surface even more in this, I mean, concerning commercial fiction. That's sort of my expectation for the future. And perhaps we will see, I mean, this is speculation, of course, but perhaps we will see, I mean, I mean,

a diversification of uh of literature in that sense so that uh that audiobooks will sort of move in one direction and print fiction pop those kinds of books popular there we move in in another one i mean that's also one hypothesis so what will happen there's also i guess the um architecture of um the streaming service so um the next book is not

you know, this isn't a library, you know, you're not kind of going like seeing what's next on the shelf or whatever. There is the kind of the role of the algorithm. So I'm also interested, I guess, in how the kind of streaming architecture intersects with what you've been saying about, you know, page turners, cliffhangers and particular kinds of

of fiction. Um, so I guess to kind of give you an actual question is what, what is the role of, um, the kind of algorithmic recommendation, um, in the, uh, streaming of audio? Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh,

It's super important. That's all these kinds of platforms. So the interface really matters. So Storytel and sort of their counterparts, they have their recommendation systems based on what you have read and what sort of similar readers have read. So those things kick in and will sort of push you. This is what you should read next, right?

Also, of course, we have a very clear pattern that if you sort of are following a series, then it always pushes you to continue in the series. So the sort of keeping up with the serial narrative is also something that I can see really clearly in the data. And then, of course, we have the more problematic part.

way that these platforms are, of course, highly commercial companies and they are also book producers in Sweden. So in Sweden, the two largest ones sort of have their own publishing houses in-house in their own streaming platform company. And that means that they are also

pushing their own in-house titles to their readers. And that can be really easy. I mean, that gets visible that Storytel... What gets most streamed on Storytel are lots of works from their in-house authors. And then the other counterpart, BookBeat, they have the same but opposite pattern. So, of course, I mean, the platform...

It matters a lot for what people choose to consume. And I mean, you could say that that's also true for a bookshop, a traditional brick-and-mortar bookshop. But I mean, it's different because it's both personalized and really in your face in another way, these digital platforms. I guess the other really kind of striking and obvious difference is...

this is being read to you. So, you know, by definition, you've not got that kind of

I suppose, internal monologue, internal authorial voice, you know, the kind of projection of imagination isn't there. And one of the things that the book does is try and use an example of a book that you've got the same book with two different narrators. And I'm intrigued, I guess, by what the impact of a narrator is, but also what happens when, you know, you've got, I guess, kind of, you know,

like a field experiment almost in what happens with the same book and two different narrators. Yeah. So, I mean, previous scholarship in audiobook studies have, I mean, almost all studies say that so the narrator, the performing narrator, the voice is

super important for uh for uh the readers or the listeners uh and i mean uh some even um stretches so far to say that that the voice or the performing narrator is even more important than the narrative or the genre or the uh the the author right um and um well and i think that this is

I mean, I had my sort of doubts on this and I tried to by means of this data. So I also have the variable of the performing narrator. And then I tried to follow in various ways. I mean, so how important does this seem to be? And for this particular book, so it was a crime novel by the Swedish author, Lars Kepler. And it was released in two versions, one with a female voice and

and one with a male voice. And the male voice was the one that had read the previous installments in this crime novel series. And what happened then was that, well, most of the readers, audiobook readers are very serious dedicated. So most of the readers that had sort of consumed the other books by Lars Kepler before,

They were interested in this, and so they tried out the voice, the new voice, the female one. But then almost all of them sort of transferred back and sort of kept with, no, this is how it should sound. But not all of them, but I mean, a clear majority. Another thing concerning voices is that there seems to be...

a clearly gendered practice here in multiple ways. So both that sort of male protagonist, so novels with male protagonists tend to have male voices and vice versa. And that makes complete sense. But also then that male readers, there are investigations. So this is not from my book, but there are investigations that,

that shows that male readers prefer male voices and vice versa. And I mean, this is interesting because then sort of a new factor will come in what people choose when they listen to audiobooks. And I think that this is already happening at parts, at least.

We've mentioned the readers kind of over and over again, and you just give an example of, I guess, two different groups of readers differentiated by genre. But one of the things that the book...

is kind of keen to do is say not all audio book readers are the same. Um, and you've, you've got, I guess I'd think of them as three kind of clusters, but three, um, kind of ideal types that you discuss. And I'm intrigued by, I guess, um, who the audio book reader is, how you sort of cluster them together or divide them up. Um, and then I suppose kind of

what having different sets or sets of audiobook readers means yeah um so um so so yeah this is this is a key a key finding i think that we cannot i mean understand um

audiobook consumption only on an aggregate level. And I think, I mean, this holds true for all kinds of cultural consumption, but it becomes, it really surfaces when you look at data also on an individual level, when you have that opportunity. And one thing that I did in the book

was to depart from two really sort of simple metrics. The one was sort of time spent in hours on the platform. And the other one was sort of books read on the platform. And then you have, I mean, a really sort of easy, I mean, a

correlation between those two variables. So the more time you spend on the platform, the more books you read. And this is also the pattern that shows. But what also shows, and what's really, really interesting to me, was that there were lots of people not, I mean, very, very far away from this pattern, far away from the regression line, lots of outliers that sort of used audiobooks in unexpected ways. I mean, at least unexpected to me. And

And one of those groups was people that sort of started to listen to lots of books, but spent quite not that much time on the platform. And I call these readers swappers. So they seem to really, really be really impatient. So they want to only sort of spend time with the best narratives. So meaning that they try out lots of titles, but not finishing only a few of them.

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Then we have the opposite group, which is even more interesting. And that's the one that spends a lot of time on the platform in terms of hours. But they are listening to very few books, which means that they are repeating the same books over and over again.

Again, I mean, and there are extreme cases here which sort of listen to the same book every day or night during an entire year, basically. And this is a fascinating kind of literature consumption because it sort of goes against everything that sort of literary scholars, and I think also most people in publishing, sort of assumes that you are interested in the narrative. But people here obviously use audiobooks

for other purposes, for relaxation, for sort of transferring to some kind of fictional world where they feel safe or at home. And part of this repeating pattern also converge with people listening at nighttime or during sort of

sleep hours. So, I mean, actually, one thing that I'm sort of, I'm teaming up now with sleep scientists here at Uppsala University because people using audiobooks as sleeping pills seems to be so widespread among audiobook users. And this is really interesting. I mean, what kind of effects is this having on, I mean, both literary culture, but also on actual sleep patterns? I think that's really interesting.

That prompts me, I seem to think, in terms of what's coming next for your own work. I mean, there's so much more you could be doing in this space. I think a book on what we listen to when we're asleep would be quite a big hit, actually, and might be a kind of crossover text because it's such a fascinating question. But also, and we've already kind of touched on this, haven't we, the question of what

is likely to happen to the publishing industry if the demands from audiobook consumers are distinctive and different from physical book consumers. And also in terms of, you know, things like business models and,

revenue streams. So what are you thinking of next in terms of your own projects? Will it be future books that draw on that bigger project that you've been part of? Or are you thinking about doing something quite different now you've been writing so much about publishing? Yeah, so I'm not

I'm not done with this yet and I think that publishing is I mean publishing and reading and those two things more and more converge to me at least so I will definitely keep doing those kinds of investigations also concerning audiobooks and one thing

that I'm already sort of started to doing is investigating sort of the next phase in audiobook publishing, which is synthetic voices. So performing voices or performing or audiobooks narrated by generative AI. And this is already sort of starting to become implemented in the business. And it will have

I mean, I think disruptive effects, actually, because in one way, it will make audiobooks much cheaper to produce, which will mean that more or less any e-book can easily be transferred to an audiobook, which will have interesting effects. But the other thing that's even more interesting to me is that, well,

So if everyone seems to agree that the voice is really important for which audiobooks you choose, if you have the sort of opportunity to choose whatever voice you like for any audiobook, basically, then that means that sort of the common ground for the same sort of cultural experience is different.

I mean, in parts disappears, right? Because, I mean, if the performed narration is an important part of this cultural consumption practice and you listen to completely different voices with completely different intonations, et cetera, then, I mean, are you consuming the same book? That's an interesting question to pose. And that's something that will sort of be soon tested live, right?

to lots of audiobook readers. Or maybe it's a return to, I guess, that kind of previous sense of the private experience of reading a book and suggesting, again, as much as your research has shown the newness and the transformations, it's important to be taking seriously the continuity with both cultural consumption but also publishing studies questions too.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I agree on this as well, of course. So, I mean, you should not perhaps overemphasize all the newness, all the times. But still, I mean, it's exciting times to study newness.

publishing, literature consumption, I mean, and all kinds of sociological questions relating to literature, I think. Because things are changing all the time. Changing and staying the same, and changing and staying the same.